Cloud Platform Models

Cloud services come in more than one flavor. Choosing the one that’s right for your project will depend on your specific needs and how much fine control you’ll need over the underlying gears and levers.

Infrastructure as a Service

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) products generally simulate the look and feel you’d get from managing physical resources. IaaS products give you direct access to a provider’s compute, storage, and networking assets. Because it’s you that’s in there playing around at the hardware level, you—rather than the IaaS provider—are responsible for the consequences of any bad configurations. The trade-off is that you get to closely configure every layer of your operating stack.

You’ll learn much more about these examples later in the book, but AWS IaaS products include Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) for virtual machine instances, Elastic Block Store (EBS) for storage volumes, and Elastic...